Trying to find my voice while face(book)less

No, I don’t have a facebook account. At first I didn’t really see the point, then it became almost a matter of principle. Simply put, I am fond of my privacy, and I find their policies terribly intrusive, but my main gripe has to do with the way in which having a facebook account has become almost a requirement.

In a world in which facebook likes have become a sort of digital currency there are sites in which you can’t even access the content unless you ‘like’ them first (i.e. sight unseen), and that’s without taking into account the fact that your facebook login has become a sort of universal id, to the point that trying to interact with the rest of the web without one becomes something of a nightmare.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know the thing has its advantages, but I miss the days when a friend was some one you knew and cared for, when liking something meant more than clicking on a button, and I certainly don’t appreciate the way in which facebook has become the gatekeeper to our digital lives, or the fact that trying to do without it turns you into a sort of outcast. Believe me, as a struggling author trying to attract an audience I am reminded on a daily basis of the price I have to pay to maintain that particular bit of independence (in fact I’m not even sure how much longer that policy will remain viable, and I’m already trying to formulate a contingency plan for the day it effectively stops being an option), but the price I would have to pay to join that ‘free’ service is so much steeper.

5 thoughts on “Trying to find my voice while face(book)less”

As a fellow artists who has facebook but doesn’t do anything with it (I also don’t like my personal information just lying around and friend only liking your stuff instead of a heartfelt conversation) I really get were you come from, and it is such a shame that in today’s society you almost get forced to get a facebook just so you can do your writing for a living!

The twisting of the words ‘friend’ and ‘like’ is one of the things that bothers me the most. I’m also fed up with people telling me ‘but you can control what others get to see, so what’s the problem?’… yes, I can control what other users get to see, but not the amount of information facebook gathers, or who has access to that information.

Precisely! I get friend requests from people that I don’t even know just so that their profile says they have hundreds of “friends” and facebook isn’t secure at all! I got hacked from Tokyo last month!?

I totally agree with you!!! I have a facebook page that I just use for blogging purposes. I don’t use my real name and have a specific email that doesn’t have real personal information in it. I’m always trying to find ways around the system!!!

If it helps, my contingency plan is to turn planned obsolescence to my advantage by wiping clean a very old iPod that’s currently gathering dust in a drawer, and to re-purpose it as a social-network device, with a specific address and no other (online) use. That way facebook can basically talk to itself.